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Wayne Brown returns home to be president, CEO of Michigan Opera Theatre

Detroit native comes from National Endowment for the Arts

The Michigan Opera Theatre today named Detroit native Wayne Brown as president and CEO.

Brown succeeds MOT founder David DiChiera, who will become the artistic director of the organization he founded in 1971. DiChiera announced earlier this year that he would be scaling back his role after having been diagnosed with prostate cancer in late 2012. He was undergoing radiation treatment but said at the time that his prognosis was “excellent.”

“It has always been too much for one person, but David’s a superman kind of guy, and he always wanted to do it all,” MOT Chairman Rick Williams, managing partner of Williams, Williams, Rattner & Plunkett PC in Birmingham, said at the time.

Brown joins MOT from the National Endowment for the Arts, based in Washington, D.C. He has been the director of music and opera at NEA since 1997. He also directed the nonprofit’s Jazz Masters Fellowship, which awards $20,000 grants to musical luminaries. Previous honorees include Ella Fitzgerald, the Marsalis family and Dizzy Gillespie.

“We are thrilled to have a man of Wayne Brown’s experience and vision to take over the role that David has so capably carried out for so many years,” Williams said in a news release. “And we are delighted that David will continue on as artistic director, the role that’s always been closest to his heart.”

David DiChiera

DiChiera founded MOT in 1971 and has grown the nonprofit into an organization with $23 million in revenue and $43 million in assets — as well as 600 employees and more than 400 volunteers — at the end of its 2012 fiscal year. He was also instrumental in convincing funders to bring a world-class opera house to Detroit by restoring the abandoned Grand Circus Theater, which now operates as the Detroit Opera House. That facility opened in 1996.

His leadership has propelled the MOT to become one of the country’s top regional opera companies. He is known for producing both acclaimed and lesser-known works. This season, he is staging La Traviata and A View From the Bridge, which is set on the docks of Brooklyn, N.Y., and based on Arthur Miller’s play of the same name.

While DiChiera will continue to oversee the artistic side of the MOT, Brown will be in charge of the day-to-day operations, such as fundraising. Brown got his start with this type of role at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where he was an administrative manager after graduating from the University of Michigan’s school of music. While at the orchestra, he helped launch the DSO’s first Classical Roots Concert.

“Coming home to Michigan to be a part of the city’s transformation and to work side-by-side with a legend like David DiChiera is a huge honor for me,” Brown said in a news release. “It’s an opportunity of a lifetime … I can’t wait to get started.”